Fugitive Slave Law

The 1850 federal fugitive slave law amended an earlier statute from 1793 that had provided for the return of runaway slaves who crossed state lines. The new, tougher measure was an essential component of the so-called Compromise of 1850 because the measure was designed to address longstanding southern complaints about the Underground Railroad. Resistance to the new law, however, soon proved widespread and the measure only further inflamed sectional antagonism. (By Matthew Pinsker)

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Continued rescues and escapes kept matters at a fever pitch for the rest of the decade. In the fall of 1851 a Maryland slave owner and his son accompanied federal marshals to Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker village, where two of the man's slaves had taken refuge. The hunters ran into a fusillade of gunfire from a house where a dozen black men were protecting the fugitives. When the shooting stopped, the slave owner was dead and his son was seriously wounded. Three of the blacks fled to Canada. This time Fillmore sent the marines. They helped marshals arrest 30 black men and a half dozen whites, who were indicted for treason. But the government's case fell apart, and the U.S. attorney dropped charges after a jury acquitted the first defendant, a Quaker.

Northern moderates accepted the Fugitive Slave Act as the price of saving the Union. But the law contained a string of features distasteful to moderates and outrageous to staunchly antislavery northerners. It denied alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury, did not allow them to testify in their own behalf, permitted their return to slavery merely on the testimony of the claimant, and enabled court-appointed commissioners to collect ten dollars if they ruled for the slaveholder but only five dollars if they ruled for the fugitive. In authorizing federal marshals to raise posses to pursue fugitives on northern soil, the law threatened to turn the North into "one vast hunting ground." In addition, the law targeted not only recent runaways but also those who had fled the South decades earlier.

For black people it was no compromise. It was a disaster. What did it matter if the slave sales were forbidden in the District of Columbia? White families living there could still keep slaves. And Southern officeholders could bring slaves to serve them in the capital city of a supposedly free, democratic nation. But the chief threat for black people came from passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, one part of the Compromise of 1850...Finally, the law said that those who knew of escaped slaves and did not report what they knew could be fined and even jailed.

Citing the new Fugitive Slave Law, they [southern slave-catchers] asked federal marshals to seize one Jerry McHenry, who they cliamed was an escaped slave. People in Syracuse were shocked to see someone in chains marched through ths streets to the federal courthouse. An angry crowd of more than 2,000 gathered. Led by abolitionist ministers, the crowd mobbed the courthouse and battered down the door. McHenry was taken from the marshals and spirited away by members of the Underground Railroad.

Abolitionist both black and white, denounced the law as draconian, immoral and unconstitutional. They vowed to resist it. Opportunities soon came, as slaveowners sent agents north to recapture fugitives, some who had escaped years earlier (the act set no statute of limitations). In February 1851 slave-catchers arrested a black man living with his family in Indiana and returned him to an owner who said he had run away 19 years before. A Maryland man tried to claim ownership of a Philadelphia woman who he said had escaped 22 years earlier; he also wanted her six children, all born in Philadelphia. In this case, the commissioner disallowed his claim to both mother and children. But statistics show that the law was rigged in favor of the claimants. In the first 15 months of its operation, 84 fugitives were returned to slavery and only 5 were released. (For the entire decade of the 1850s the ration was 332 to 11.)

Despite promising signs that the Compromise of 1850 would be accepted, differences over slavery did not end. In 1851 an escaped salve named Shadrach was arrested in Boston. He was rescued by a group of fellow blacks. "The rescue of Shadrach" wrote antislavery supporter Wendell Phillips, "has set the whole public afire." A Maryland slave owner, reclaiming two of his runaway slaves in Pennsylvania, was killed by a mob. In New York, a well known black named James Hamlet was captured. A Maryland woman claimed that he was a runaway. Hamlet was taken directly to Maryland without a court hearing and without being allowed to see his wife and children. These acts touched off public outcries.

Clarence L. Ver Steeg, American Spirit: A History of the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1985), 387.

Others actively resisted [the Fugitive Slave Act]. Theodore Parker, the clergyman and abolitionist, denounced the law as "a hateful statute of kidnappers" and headed a Boston vigilance committee that openly violated it. In February 1851, an angry crowd in Boston overpowered federal marshals and snatched away a runaway named Shadrach from a courtroom, put him on the Underground Railroad, and whisked him away off to Montréal Canada.

James L. Roark, et al., eds., The American Promise: A History of the United States, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 457.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass urged 'forcible resistance.' A former slave himself, Douglass protested that the Fugitive Slave Act made northerners 'the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.' People who had supported the Compromise of 1850 were shocked at the government's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Several northern states defiantly passed 'personal liberty' laws, which prevented state officials from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act and guaranteed captured runaway slaves legal assistance. Amos. A. Lawrence, a northern Democrat, voiced a common sentiment: 'We have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer... I am done catching negroes for the South.' Some Northerners took direct action. In New York and Massachusetts, angry mobs freed runaway slaves taken into custody and helped them on their way to freedom in Canada. One observer wrote, ' We went to bed one night old fashioned conservative Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.'

Efforts to catch and return fugitive slaves inflamed feelings in both the North and the South. In 1854, a Boston mob, aroused by antislavery speeches, broke into a courthouse killed a guard in an abortive effort to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Determined to prove that the law could be enforced 'even in Boston', President Franklin Pierce sent a detachment of federal troops to escort Burns to the harbor, where a ship carried him back to slavery. As five platoons of troops marched with the Burns to the ship, some fifty thousand people lined the streets. As the procession passed, one Bostonian hung from his window a black coffin bearing the words 'THE FUNERAL OF LIBERTY'. Another draped an American flag upside down as a symbol that 'my country is eternally disgraced by this day's proceedings.'...A Boston committee later successfully purchased Burns's freedom, but other fugitives had worse fates. Margaret Garner, about to be captured and sent back to Kentucky as a slave, slit her daughter's throat and tried to kill her other children rather than witness their return to slavery.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave the federal government more power than any other law passed by Congress. The constitution required that a slave who escaped into a free state must be returned to his or her owner. But it did not specify how that should be done. Under the 1793 Law, Slaveowners could take recaptured property before any state or federal court to prove ownership. This procedure worked well enough so long as states were willing to cooperate. But as the antislavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, some officials proved uncooperative. And professional slave-catchers went to far kidnapping free blacks, forgoing false affidavits to 'prove' they were slaves, selling them south into bondage. Several northern states responded by passing antikidnapping laws giving alleged fugitives the right to testify on their own behalf and the right to trail by jury. The laws also prescribed criminal penalties for kidnapping. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania's antikidnapping law unconstitutional. But the Court also ruled that enforcement of the Constitution's fugitive slave clause was entirely a federal responsibility, thereby absolving the states of any need to cooperate in enforcing it. Nine northern states thereupon passed personal liberty laws which prohibited the use of state facilities (courts, jails, police or sheriffs and so on) in the recapture of fugitives.

Unable to protect their freedom through legal means, many blacks, with the support of white allies, resorted to flight and resistance. Thousands of northern blacks fled to Canada - 3,000 in the last three months of 1850s alone - sometimes under the very nose of slave-catchers. In 1852 slave-catchers arrested a fugitive who had taken the name Shadrach when he escaped from Virginia a year earlier. They rushed him to the federal courthouse, where a few deputy marshals held him, pending a hearing. But group of black men broke into the courtroom, overpowered the deputies, and spirited Shadrach out of the country to Canada. This was too much for the Fillmore administration. In April 1851 another fugitive, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston, and the president sent 250 soldiers to help 300 armed deputies enforce the law and return Sims to slavery.

Attempts to enforce the new law provoked wholesale opposition. In Congress, a Free Soiler declared that it would be the same as 'murder' to return a fugitive to slavery. Eight northern states attempted to invalidate the law by enacting 'personal liberty' laws that forbade state officials from assisting in the return of runaways and extended the right of jury trial to fugitives. Southerners regarded these attempts to obstruct the return of runaways as a violation of the constitution and federal law.

The South's demand for an effective fugitive slave law was a major source of sectional tension. Efforts to enforce the law resulted in abuses that repelled many northern moderates. In one instance, a free man named James Hamlet was seized in New York and sent into slavery. Riots directed against the law broke out in many cities. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851, a gun battle broke out between abolitionists and slave catchers, and in Wisconsin, an abolitionist editor named Sherman M. Booth freed Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave, from a local jail. In Boston, federal marshals and 22 companies of state troops were needed to prevent a crowd from storming a courthouse to free a fugitive named Anthony Burns.

Other northerners, white as well as black, increased their work for the underground railroad in response to the fugitive slave law. Several states passed "personal liberty laws" that prohibited the use of state officials and institutions in the recovery of fugitive slaves. But most northerners complied with the law. Of some 200 blacks arrested in the first six years of the law, only 15 were rescued, and only 3 of these by force. Failed rescues, in fact, had more emotional impact than successful ones. In two cases in the early 1850s (Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854), angry mobs of abolitionists in Boston, reminiscent of the prerevolutionary days of the Tea Party, failed to prevent the forcible return of blacks to the South. These celebrated cases aroused the antislavery emotions of more northerners then the abolitionists had been able to do in a thousand tracts and speeches.

A number of dramatic incidents grealty inflamed Northern opinion about both slavery and the South. Early in 1851 a black man named Frederick Wilkins was working quietly as a waiter in a Boston coffeehouse. Suddenly he was seized by a Virginia slave catcher who knew him as Shadrach, a runaway slave. While Wilkins was being held for return to Virginia, a crowd of African Americans burst into the courthouse and led him away to safety. ... Several years later, federal troops lined the streets of Boston as a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was marched from the courthouse to a ship waiting to carry him back to Virginia. A gigantic crowd of fifty thousand people hissed and shouted in protest.

Yet the Compromise of 1850 did serve for a short time as a basis for sectional peace. Southern moderate coalitions won out over radicals, but southern nationalism remained strong. Southerners demanded strict northern adherence to the compromise, especially to the Fugitive Slave Law, as the price for suppressing threats of secession. In the North, the compromise received greater support. The Fugitive Slave Law was unpopular in areas where abolitionism was particularly strong, and there were a few sensational rescues or attempted rescues of escaped slaves. But for the most part, the northern states adhered to the law during the next few years. When the Democrats and the Whigs approved or condoned the compromise in their 1852 platforms, it seemed that sharp differences on the slave issue had once again been banished from national politics.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, also helped to keep the issue of slavery before the people. The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the feelings of most militant abolitionists about the Fugitive Slave Law when he wrote 'this filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write. I will not obey it.' Several northern states responded to the pressure of abolitionists. These states openly defied the Fugitive Slave Law by passing 'personal liberty laws.' Such Laws forbade local officials to help in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Many northerners defied the Fugitive Slave Law. Meanwhile, some southerners talked of increasing their power in Congress by acquiring new slave territory. The Spanish colony of Cuba seemed especially attractive. In fact, many advocates of manifest destiny, or expansionism, had long hoped to gain control over that island.

One part of the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Law. The law required Northerners to help capture escaped slaves and return them to slaveholders in the South. People who broke the law could receive a six-month jail term and a $1,000 fine. Before the Fugitive Slave Law went into effect, an enslaved person might escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad to free states. Now, there would be no escaping to safety anywhere in the United States. Even free African Americans might be rounded up in error and sent to slaveholders. If captured, African Americans were not even allowed to tell their story to a jury. Many Northerners were upset about the law. It forced them to be part of the slave system even though they did not support it. In response, riots broke out in several northern cities.

Shortly after the passage of the act [Fugitive Slave Law], a New Yorker, James Hamlet, was seized, convicted, and even rushed off to slavery in Maryland without even being allowed to communicate with his wife or children. The New York black community was outraged, and with help from white neighbors it swiftly raised $800 to buy his freedon. In 1851 Euphemia Williams, was seized, her presumed owner claiming also her six children, all Pennsylvania-born. A federal judge released Mrs. Williams, but the case created alarm in the North. Abolitionists often interfered with the enforcement of the law, even in cases where the black was unquestionably a runaway. When two Georgians came to Boston to reclaim William and Ellen Craft, admitted fugitives, an abolitionist ''Vigilance Commitee' forced them to return home empty-handed. The Crafts prudently - or perhaps in disgusts- decided to leave the United States for England. Early in 1851, a Virginia agent captured Frederick "Shadrach" Wilkins, a waiter in a Boston coffee house. While Wilkins was being held for deportation, a mob of blacks broke into the courthouse and freed him. That October a slave named Jerry, who had escaped from Missouri, was arrested in Syracuse, New York. Within minutes the whole town had the news. Crowds surged through the streets, and when night fell, a mob smashed into the building where Jerry was being held and spirited him away to safety.

John A. Garraty and Robart A. McCaughey, eds., The American Nation: A History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 198), 397.

Although the Compromise of 1850 was approved, many problems remained. Abolitionists stated that the Fugitive Slave Law clashed with the Bill of Rights. Under the Fugitive Slave Law, a free African American could be captured and sold into slavery.

James A. Banks et al., eds., United States: Adventures in Time and Place (New York: McGraw-Hill School Division, 1999), 462.

The fugitive Slave Law, the part of the Compromise of 1850 that provided for the return of escaped slaves, proved to be almost universally hated in the North. 1851, for example, a group of southern slave-catchers, hired to track down escaped slaves, arrived in Syracuse, New York. Citing the new law, they asked federal marshals to seize Jerry McHenry, who they claimed was an escaped slave. People in Syracuse were shocked to see a man in chains marched through the streets to the federal courthouse. Led by abolitionist ministers, a crowd of more than 2,000 mobbed the courthouse and took McHenry from the Marshals. Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed the Fugitive Slave Law 'a law which no man can obey... without the loss of self-respect.' Some northern states passed 'personal liberty laws' that denied state help to federal marshals attempting to capture escaped slaves. Southerners were outraged at the North's resistance to the law. They saw this resistance as a breach of the Compromise of 1850 and feared that abolitionists were gaining control of the North.

David C. King, Norman McRae, and Jaye Zola, The United States and Its People (Menlo Park, California: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993), 292.

So savage was this 'Man-stealing Law' [Fugitive Slave Act] that it touched off an explosive chain reaction in the North. Many Shocked moderates, hitherto passive, were driven into the swelling ranks of the antislaveryites. When a runaway slave from Virginia was captured in Boston in 1854, he had to be removed from the city under heavy federal guard through streets lined with sullen Yankees and shadowed by black-draped buildings festooned with flags flying upside dow. One prominent Bostonian who witnessed this grim spectacle wrote that 'we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.'

Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 10th ed., (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994), 407.

'This filthy encactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write,' Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled in his journal. He advised neighbors to break it 'on the earliest occasion.' The occasion soon arose in many places. Within a month of the law's enactment, claims were filed in New York, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Detroit, and other cities. Trouble soon followed. In Detroit only military force stopped the rescue of an alleged fugitive by an outraged mob in October 1850. There were relatively few such incidents, however, In the first six years of the fugitive act, only three fugitives were forcibly rescued from the slave-catchers. On the other hand, probably fewer than 200 were returned to bondage during the same years. More then that were rescued by stealth, often through the Underground Railroad. Still, the Fugitive Slave Act had the tremendous effect of widening and deepening the anitslavery impulse in the North.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass urged 'forcible resistance.' A former slave himself, Douglass protested that the Fugitive Slave Act made northerners 'the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.' People who had supported the Compromise of 1850 were shocked at the government's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Several northern states defiantly passed 'personal liberty' laws, which prevented state officials from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act and guaranteed captured runaway slaves legal assistance. Amos. A. Lawrence, a northern Democrat, voiced a common sentiment: 'We have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer... I am done catching negroes for the South.' Some Northerners took direct action. In New York and Massachusetts, angry mobs freed runaway slaves taken into custody and helped them on their way to freedom in Canada. One observer wrote, ' We went to bed one night old fashioned conservative Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.'

In the Northern strongholds of anitslavey sentiment the new law simply could not be enforced; during the 1850s abolitionists executed a series of dramatic rescues of fugitives and sent them on to Canada and freedom. Moreover, various Northern states passed personal liberty laws which nullified the fugitive slave act or at least interfered with its enforcement. This was an assertation of state rights and a form of nullificaton that Southerners scarcely appreciated.

John M. Blum, et al. eds., The National Experience: A History of the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), 283.

Others were immediately upset. The new fugitive slave law angered many northerners because it brought the evils of slavery right into their midst. The owners of runaway slaves hired agents, labeled 'kidnappers' in the North, to hunt down fugitives. In a few dramatic episodes, most notably in Boston, literary and religious intellectuals led mass protests to resist slave hunters' efforts to return alleged fugitives to the South. When Senator Webster supported the law, New England aboliltionists denounced him as 'indescribably base and wicked.' Theodore Parker called the new law a 'hateful statute of kidnappers,' and Ralph Waldo Emerson said it was a 'filthy law' that he would not obey. Frederick Douglass would not obey it either. As a runaway slave himself, he was threatened with arrest and return to the South until his friends overcame his objections and purchased his freedom. Douglass still risked harm by his strong defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Arguing the 'rightfulness of forcible resistance,' he urged free blacks to arm themselves and even wondered whether it was justifiable to kill kidnappers. 'The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter,' he said in Pittsburg in 1853, 'is to make a half dozen or more dead kidnappers.' Douglass raised money for black fugitives, hid runaways in his home, and help hundreds escape to Canada.

By 1851, the issue of slavery arose again. In October 1851 a group of Southern slave-catchers, hired to track down fugitive slaves, arrived in Syracuse, New York. Citing the new Fugitive Slave Law, they asked federal marshals to seize one Jerry McHenry, who they claimed was an escaped slave. People in Syracuse were shocked to see someone in chains marched through the streets to the federal courthouse. An angry crowd of more than 2,000 gathered. Led by abolitionist ministers, the crown mobbed the courthouse and battered down the door. McHenry was taken from the marshals and spirited away by members of the Underground Railroad. This and other slave-catching incidents brought the issue of slavery to the very doorsteps of northerners. People who had thought little about slavery before were now stirred to anger. Ministers, newspaper editors, and political leaders railed against the law as 'a hateful statute of kidnappers.' Some northern states passed 'personal liberty laws' forbidding officials to help slave-catchers.

In Boston, the day after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, armed forces were needed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. A battalion of United States artillery, four platoons of marines, and a sheriff's posse were called out to escort a runaway slave from the courthouse to the ship that was waiting to carry him back to the South Everywhere throughout the North, people once again talked about slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law became increasingly difficult to enforce. 'Anti-Nebraska' meetings were held, at which Douglas was denounced for reopening the slavery dispute.

Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. Deputy Marshall, for Kidnapping, with Arguments of Counsel & Charge of Justice Marvin, on the Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law, in the Supreme Court of New York. Syracuse, NY: Power Press of the Daily Journal Office, 1852.